My friends from Journey Church were here and I kept getting the question…Do you teach class today?  Several attempts at explaining the days of the week and how I teach at least one class on each of those days…yes, I do teach today.

Yes, I have been very busy.  Monday through Thursday I teach a beginners English class at the school that Chris and I started.  Classes have thinned out to manageable class sizes and we are moving along in our books.  Friday, I tutor in the early afternoon, then I teach at Amen Institute.  I teach a few hours Saturdays and Sundays at Amen also.

Seven days a week is wearing on me a little.  I took a Sunday off two weeks ago and went snorkeling.  We took our whole group out on a couple of wooden sailboats to a spot with some good underwater scenery.

This last Sunday, Ben and I took a ride on our twin motorcycles.  We did about a 100 mile round trip up through Anse-Rouge to Ti Riviere.  I will stick to my commitments this session, but I think I will only teach on the week days in the future.

Teaching all of those students has given me a little popularity.  I find it rare to drive around town now without hearing “Teacher Scott!” hollered from the sidewalk at least once.  My plan for tutoring on Fridays has taken an unexpected turn.  I was hoping that I could get the students that were struggling a little to come in and get help to stay caught up with the rest of the class…but I got the students that were already doing well coming in and wanting more.  I usually have 15 students on Fridays that have questions on how to pronounce and use new words that they found in other books or heard in music.

We have free flowing shower drains again!  All of the holes in the yard have been filled back up!

BEES!!!

We were getting ready to use some of the wall panels that have been sitting in the yard since November.  I had noticed that there were a lot of bees coming and going from one of the stacks…when I lifted the panel, this is what I found!

I think there are about 6 or 7 combs there…full of honey and whatever!  I thought about it for a bit and decided that I would become a bee keeper.  I did some googling of bees and hives…now I am an expert.  Well, not really, but there is an expert on his way here!  Another one of those reminders that He gives us every now and then.  Grace Deal’s dad has bee-keeping as one of his hobbies.  He is bringing down a bee keepers suit and a smoker and he is going to help me move the colony from the wall panels to the beautiful new bee hive that I am in the progress of making.

With help from my friend Jean Philipe, I have built the boxes for two separate bee hives.  I still have to build the bases and roofs for both of them.  And I still have a few frames to make.  Six boxes per hive…two deep hive body boxes and four shallow honey supers…ten frames per box…120 frames.  I did finish the swarm catching frames and I built enough of the others to get started.  Thanks Jacob Thompson for letting me borrow your table saw for so long…still using it!  It would not have been practical without it…I could have used a set of dado blades though.

Benefit of the project already…I needed a router stand, so I built one…now I have one!

Grace got a new puppy.  Tartuga…Tug.

The nursery in our yard continues to impress!  Our tomatoes are growing great…started them from seed and they are all thriving…one variety is doing especially well, it is aptly named the Jubilee Tomato!  Almost all of our cuttings have taken root and are producing vegitation of their own, our crop of Vincas are all blooming and getting strong.  The only plants we have had trouble with are the peppers…can’t seem to get them growing (or even germinating)  We will keep trying on those!

Our dump truck broke.  Ben was dumping a load of rock in our depot in Jubilee and the piston broke through the dump box when it was half way up and full of rocks.  The box came crashing down on the cab and that is probably the end of that truck…the frame broke on both sides along with the drive shaft.  The box came down and smashed the cab all up.  Thank God that Ben is all right (and that I decided to watch him dump it from a little ways away.)

I am looking forward to seeing familiar faces soon.  Thank you all again for your prayers and support.  I feel truly blessed that I am able to be down here.  I could not do it without your help!